Ata Method's Performance in the M4 Competition

Like the previous M competitions, M4 competition resulted in great contributions tothe field of forecasting. Ata method which is a new forecasting method alternative toexponential smoothing, competed in this competition with five different models. Theresults obtained from these five models are discussed in detail in this paper. According tovarious error metrics, the models perform better than their exponential smoothing basedcounters. Despite their simplicity, they are ranked satisfactorily high compared to theother methods. In addition, the forecasting accuracy of simple combinations of these Atamodels and ARIMA are given for the M4 competition data set. The combinations worksignificantly better than models that are much more complex. Therefore, besides the factthat Ata models perform well alone, Ata should be considered as a candidate for beingincluded in combinations of forecasts.